SURVIVN'

Survivin' was my second collaboration with Bastille. They came to me during lockdown with both What You Gonna Do and Surviving. I think because they couldn't shoot live-action music videos anymore, they started looking at animation.

When I listened to Surviving, I felt like it captured something that everyone was going through at the time. People were recalibrating their lives, their jobs, their priorities. The song is about surviving a difficult crisis and finding a way through it, but to me it also had a spiritual message.

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I started thinking about someone with one of the emptiest jobs I could imagine—working on Wall Street, living inside this concrete jungle. What happens when that person suddenly starts looking for something more meaningful?

That's where the sphere of stained glass came from. It was inspired by the stained-glass windows in churches and cathedrals—a spiritual experience appearing in the middle of a modern city.

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The idea of leaving Earth and then coming back was also important to me. During COVID, it felt like we had all been forced to step back and look at our lives from a distance. We suddenly had this opportunity to ask ourselves whether we wanted to keep living the same way or reinvent ourselves. I wasn't trying to make a lecture—it's still a music video—but those ideas naturally found their way into the visuals.

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Visually, I was influenced by photographers like William Eggleston, Saul Leiter, and Joel Meyerowitz. Their way of observing everyday life, light, and the city had a big influence on the piece.